Religion, Evolution, and the Ecstasy of Self-Transcendence
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes the apparently universal human ability for transcendent spiritual experience: losing the self, merging with something beyond us, and the ecstasy that accompanies...
View ArticleBonobo Makes Stone Tools Like the Early Humans Did
Kanzi, a 30-year-old male bonobo chimp at the University of Haifa in Israel, has learned to make stone tools similar to those made by early hominids, and uses them as choppers, scrapers, and diggers....
View ArticleThe Origin of Life: A New Theory Based in Physics
Jeremy England, a physicist at MIT, may have found the underlying physics driving the origin and evolution of life. Physics is definitely not my strong suit. But the questions of how life arose on...
View ArticleWin Wenger: Toward a General Theory of Systems
After I posted about Jeremy England’s theory of the origin of life, a friend pointed me to the writings of Win Wenger, specifically a 1979 monograph titled “Toward a General Theory of Systems: One...
View ArticleWill Virtual Afterlives Transform Humanity?
I have previously written (here) of my skepticism about the idea of replicating conscious human minds in computers. My skepticism remains intact, but setting that aside for the moment, I find the ideas...
View ArticleA Postcard from Asimov
In January of 1981, I received this postcard from Isaac Asimov, the prolific science fiction writer: The postcard was in response to a letter I’d written to Asimov after reading his 1979 nonfiction...
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